PB & J Sandwiches

Here I am, enjoying a peanut butter and homemade blackberry jam on white bread sandwich, (Denna's still out of town, so I'm roughing it) thinking about the pizzas I made the other night.

I had been on a search for a good Thin and Crispy pizza dough recipe I could use on the Egg. I really like Pizza Hut's, Pizza Inn and recently California Pizza's neapolitan style pizzas. And fortunately they're all still close by so I can get one if I want to go out. But I have the Egg and a wonderful setup so I wanted to be able to enjoy the same style pizzas here at home.

I've tried premade dough mixes like from Trader Joe's but they turned out too thick and chewy. So I started Googling and found a couple of recipes that seemed to fit the bill. Especially this one, Thin Cracker-Crust Pizza Recipe. The photos and description seemed to be just what I was looking for and didn't seem too hard. The key they said is to use a high-gluten flour with at least 12% protein or higher. Yeah, right. Like I'm going to know how to figure that out. Luckily they said any good bread flour should work, so I picked up a bag at Whole Foods and went home to try it out.

The only draw-back is you have to make the dough the day before and keep it in the refrigerator. Denna and I are way too spontaneous, spur of the moment type diners for that to work too well, but it did say you can leave it in the fridge for a few days. That may work for us. We'll see.

I made the dough up and left it in the fridge. As it was, the AVP tourney interrupted my plans and so it was 3 days before I had the chance to try it out. Angela was over that night so I fired up the Egg, put the pizza stone in it to get it nice and hot and we began to make our pizzas. I had made up some basil pesto in anticipation of this so I used that with a little tomato sauce for my base, topped it with mozzarella and then some large thin sliced pepperoni. I had worked the dough out really well with the rolling pin, (can't do the hand-tossed thing), so it was looking pretty good. Unfortunately I didn't take a shot of it so I don't have a photo to show you. (Jo, I know you can visualize what I'm describing, can't you?)

Angela doesn't like pesto so she made one with tomato sauce, some Tuscany Italian seasoning we had on hand, fresh sliced tomatoes, mozzarella and pepperoni. Umm, they both looked great. Popped them in the egg, one at a time. Cooked them about 12-15 minutes each and They Were Perfect!! The crust was crispy, flaky, with just a few of those neat little air bubbles here and there. The bottom had about a dozen almost-burnt spots on it, and the flavor was just like Pizza Inn. Bingo, I now have my perfect Egg pizza dough recipe. This isn't a shot of my pizza but the crust looked just like this one, so at least you'll have an idea of what I'm talking about.

I think I'll mix up some dough tomorrow so I'll have it on hand just in case Denna wants to try some when she gets home later this week. By the way, the PBJ's were amazing! Are you hungry yet?